Mapping Hacks

Dear “mapping hacks” blog readers, if there are any of you left after our long hiatus; sorry about the long hiatus!

2006 begins auspiciously for the edge of the geospatial web, with an hour-long discussion on the subject broadcast on NPR today. The many-talented Rekha Murthy was responsible for inspiring and producing the show, which features Mike Liebhold of the IFTF (who wrote most of the preface to “Mapping Hacks”), Julian Bleeker, a visionary arts/academicist in locative media, Christopher Allen from the trendy Yellow Arrow, and Peter Morville, the author of O’Reilly’s Ambient Findability. Seasoned, jaded geo***ers may not find much new in it, but it would be a good thing for them to play to family and friends in an effort to explain what it is they are actually working on.

Boston NPR page about the event, with links to real and WMA streams, and a PodCastTM in mp3 format, which may be slightly edited down.

What else is new and shiny nearby? Quite a few new Open Guides have appeared, including a Open Guide to Boston set up, scrape-populated, googlemapped and otherwise augmented by the hyperenergetic Chris Schmidt. Steve Coast announced that OpenStreetmap racked up its 1000′th registered contributor a few days ago. The GeoServer project’s Chris Holmes has started blogging interesting philosophical reflections on the open source process and geodata access, amongst many other things.

Schuyler and Rich’s followup book, Google Maps Hacks, has finally gone to print, and is expected to be in the shops in a month or two. I hope it will inspire geoweb-curious people who don’t have much Linux or programming experience, to get their hands wet, get hooked, and turn to Mapping Hacks and Web Mapping Illustrated to build their own custom applications.

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